Major Internet Platforms Ban Alex Jones. Jones is a noted conspiracy theorist and the founder of the InfoWars website and podcast. In a Monday tweet, he confirmed that Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple had completely unpublished and/or removed his professional pages and podcasts. [Reason.com]

It’s been well known for a while that those organizations hate anyone who’s not a liberal, and have a long history of censoring opposing viewpoints. It’s unusual for a bunch of them to get together for a coordinated purge like this, though. The most likely reason I’ve seen for it is that there’s a midterm election coming up, and the liberals are afraid of the very large Infowars audience being exposed to unapproved thoughts. For those who want to see what the Thought Police don’t want you to know, see the Infowars channel on BitChute.

A few hours after U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik, a Clinton appointee, muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order Tuesday evening, the CodeIsFreeSpeech.com mirror site appeared. It’s a project of the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups, and includes freely downloadable computer-aided design (CAD) files for the AR-15, AR-10, Ruger 10-22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms. [Reason.com]

Beginning in July, Google will no longer accept advertisements from private bail bond services. David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, explained the decision Monday: “We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products…”

[…]

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put out a statement Monday afternoon supporting Google’s decision: “No one should be incarcerated—before they’ve even been tried or convicted of a crime—simply because they can’t afford not to be.” [Hit & Run]

So in order to help poor people who have trouble affording bail, they’re trying to make it harder for poor people to afford bail. It’s amazing how consistently rich liberals respond to problems affecting poor people by doing things that make those problems worse.

What Do You Call a Tool to Help Uber Avoid Gov’t Stings? A Good Start. Uber uses a tool called “Greyball” to circumvent officials. It’s a tool that Uber says is designed to help it deny ride requests to people who violate their terms of service, disrupt the system, or threaten their drivers. They also have been using it to operate in places where government officials have been trying to shut them down.

[…]

Uber used this tool to operate in Portland, Oregon, as regulators attempted to use sting operations to catch them and shut them down. As the story explains, this all bothered authorities because Uber was employing people and putting them to work outside of their purview… [Hit & Run]

This is pretty old news now, but it’s another reason to prefer Uber over other ride sharing services: they were willing to do something to protect their drivers from corrupt and oppressive local governments who were paid off by the taxi cartels to attack them.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it will pay for a range of environmentally beneficial projects to compensate for the emissions from the millions of car journeys it provides every week. The tactic, known as carbon offsets, is a way for Lyft to do something about climate change without changing its business model. [Slashdot]

So Lyft is gambling that there are more prospective customers among religious fanatics who actually care that the company they get a ride from is buying indulgences than there are among sane people who don’t want to pay extra for a ride to pay for someone else’s religious beliefs. I’ll bet this makes Uber executives very happy.

The Twitter Rules. You also may not affiliate with organizations that — whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform — use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. We will begin enforcing this rule around affiliation with such organizations on December 18, 2017. [Twitter.com]

Supposedly this new Twitter rule will be going into effect today, with people who violate it having their accounts banned. However, this is obviously not going to happen. If it did, every account associated with any government would be banned, as would anyone affiliated with any government (including employees and businesses that do business with governments). Since this covers not just activity but statements, mainstream media sources such as the New York Times and CNN would also be banned.

But of course this is Twitter, so they’ll actually just be banning people who aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic Social Justice Warriors, because anything that makes a pinko sad is literally violence.

The incident occurred in January 2016. Daniel Shaver apparently was showing off a pellet gun, and it was visible through the hotel room window. This prompted somebody to call to the hotel front desk, which prompted a call to the police. [Hit & Run]

It’s perfectly legal to carry real guns either openly or concealed in Arizona, to say nothing of a pellet gun in a temporary residence. Of course, cops don’t care about the law.

Drone Strike in Yemen Likely First of Trump Administration. . A second strike on Friday, Donald Trump’s first day in the Oval Office, killed three alleged militants, according to the Associated Press, which reported that Yemeni government officials (who often feed U.S. intelligence information on targets) attributed the strikes to the U.S. [Hit & Run]

When Trump took office it was the first time in sixteen years that a President wasn’t already a war criminal at his inauguration. Trump didn’t even make it a day before changing that.

Last weekend I moved to a new apartment. I’d gotten fed up with the terrible management at the last apartment complex, so I left as soon as my lease expired. The new place is about the same size, also has Google Fiber, and has an even better view–I can see Town Lake from my desk.

Whatever it was, two different people spotted a man carrying it near Poly High in Riverside, California. They saw something, and said something. As a result four local schools went into lockdown mode yesterday.

Police hunted for the menacing maniac and finally, according to The Press Enterprise, “a campus supervisor at Poly spotted a man who matched the description given by both callers.”

The weapon he was carrying?

An umbrella.

The lockdowns were lifted, but the threat continues: Rain is in the forecast. [Hit & Run]

That was the high school where I was an inmate in the 1980s. I took ROTC while I was there, which involved about a hundred students marching around with bolt-action rifles (albeit rifles which had been rendered incapable of firing) at least one day a week. No lockdowns were involved.